Grand imperial: Karim Said’s debut album explores the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire

As the empire declined and fell, music underwent an extraordinary creative flowering that ushered in the modern world.

‘The upcoming Schoenberg Concert’, a caricature that appeared in Der Zeit in April 1913. Imagno / Getty Images
Powered by automated translation

What does an empire breaking up sound like? This question hangs over a new album released this year by the 26-year-old Jordanian pianist Karim Said. Entitled Echoes from an Empire, the collection gathers together music composed just before the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, just as it was about to be dismantled following the First World War.

Including music by the Austrians Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, the Czech Janácek, the Hungarian Bartok and the Romanian Enescu, the album’s concept works rather brilliantly in conjuring up the fizz and ferment of an empire on the way out. Even without the imperial connection, these are composers who created vital, interesting musical paths from the 19th century into the future. Brought together as a collection, their music adds up to something more. It’s a snapshot of a moment of incredible creativity and experiment, and a cultural omen of the imminent death of the world that created it.

There’s an obvious parallel at work here, between the fate of the empire and the work its composers created as it was dissolving. Once a mighty power, Austria-Hungary’s borders stretched from Vienna far south to the Adriatic and far east to what is now Ukraine. While the First World War saw it finally shattered, political and cultural movements from the many subject nations of the empire had been pushing for its dissolution into smaller nation states for decades. At the same time, artists from across the empire were in the process of breaking down the borders of the empire’s aesthetic and intellectual culture just as its physical borders were also being questioned.

Among the avant-garde, they replaced it with new art that made no attempt to hide its cracks – and whose jaggedness remains gripping, even popular today.The period produced the shimmering, perspective-shattering paintings of Gustav Klimt and the fragmented works of Czech cubist František Kupka. In print, the Austrian Robert Musil and the Czech Franz Kafka pushed against the idea of the objective, all-powerful writer. The old Austro-Hungarian Empire’s greatest, most unique break with the past was arguably in music, in the works of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, who dispensed in the end with traditional tonality – the sense of music needing to be “in tune”.

But while some composers were looking forward, others were looking back. Not to Austria-Hungary anymore, but to the local cultures it had lorded over, which needed to be revived for the empire’s successor states to recreate – or create – national cultures. Musically, this meant leaving the concert halls and going back to the villages. Exploring a peasant tradition that had once been looked down on as backward and coarse (and was itself being dissolved by industrialisation) had long been a feature of the Czech composers Smetana, Dvorák and Janácek, but musical modernism also helped open ears to traditional music once considered too raw. Bartok, a Hungarian, travelled across central Europe recording old peasant tunes sung live with a gramophone. The results were sometimes tuneful, sometimes bracingly harsh – an influence which western art music could now absorb uncritically for the first time.

These artistic tendencies weren’t purely a reflection of local political concerns, of course. This was, after all, also the era of Picasso, of James Joyce and Stravinsky, and of poetic folklore explorers such as Yeats. There’s still no denying that “Austrian” art can only have been sharpened by the end of empire. The lacy frou-frou world of much of 19th-century Viennese culture must have seemed extremely, even laughably, distant for these artists.

This distance reverberates through Echoes from an Empire, but the album arguably sounds not so much like something happening as something about to happen. Certainly the Austrian composers are already stepping towards atonality, while the enthusiasm that Bartok, Enescu and Janácek show for folk melodies hints at their respective countries' futures. But while these changes are coming up, on Said's new album they're only just poking onstage from the wings. The Austrians' music maybe breaking into an entirely new space, but it also bears strong traces of the 19th century, still basking in fading rays of late romantic moonlight. And rather than expressing simple national pride, Bartok, Enescu and Janácek reflect an unease, sometimes at the oppressive weight of the empire, sometimes at the cultural changes that were tearing up the musical rule book.

Making a division between Austrians and the empire’s subjects included here is, of course, slightly artificial. Rather than being a folksy throwback, Bartok’s music proved to be just as groundbreaking as Schoenberg’s in its way. But hanging over the album there’s still a sense of paths forking, of farewells being taken.

Most present of all, however, is a heady, melancholy beauty that's enhanced by gutsy, firm-footed interpretation by Said. It's an undeniably bold choice for a debut artist (this is Said's first album) in a classical music world where focusing on a mainly traditional repertoire is seen as a sort of creative rite of passage for young performers. The choice is, by the by, a brilliant riposte to the idea that spiky, challenging art is in some way the product of ineptitude. Picasso's early work proved he could draw like an angel before he moved towards cubism. Likewise the early music included here from later ultra-modernist Webern proves to be exquisite, lush and – considering his future path – almost old-fashioned. His delicate Sonata Movement (Rondo) of 1906 swings between chromatic ­eeriness and sweetly tuned major chords, recalling both Mahler and earlier work by his teacher Schoenberg. Alban Berg's Piano Sonata of 1908 keeps us in an even tighter grip. Still sticking within a tonal framework (it is "in tune"), it snakes through so many unexpected harmonies and chromatic slides that the listener never loses a sense of tension, a feeling of many conflicting, complicated emotions tied together in a single intricate knot. The result is intense, unsettling.

You can also hear this sense of elegantly expressed foreboding in Janácek's sonata From the Street, 1st October, 1905. The piece's entry is almost silky in its delicacy, conjuring up images of oars being dipped in water. This is ultimately shattered, however, by anxious, percussive march-like passages that stamp into the piece, setting the sonata up for a second movement of bleak but tender beauty. This mood makes more sense when you understand what the title refers to: the day a worker was killed by police in the Moravian city of Brno while protesting in favour of a Czech-language university. Janácek's musical experiments aren't only about looking for new forms of expression – they run in parallel to his compatriots' push for a genuinely independent national culture.

Not every composer on the album is so keen to kiss the past goodbye. The Piano Suite No. 2 by Enescu included here could be read as a broadside against modernism, taking four baroque musical forms (a Toccata, a Sarabande, a Pavane and a Bourrée) and breathing fresh life into them via references to Romanian folk music. This isn't music that's looking forward – Enescu's Sarabande could almost be early Debussy or late Liszt – but it's arguably the revelation of the album, not because it's notably better, but because its high quality comes with far less fame attached. Of all the music here, Enescu's seems least willing to let go of the past. If anything, Said's showcase proves that he needn't necessarily have fought it so strongly. There may be a strand of angst shot through the music here, but there's also the thrill of minds moving, societies changing, ice melting.

The album is available from Amazon.co.uk.

Feargus O’Sullivan is a regular contributor to The National.